Honing customer experience -- with a little help from IBM

14th September 2013
Honing customer experience -- with a little help from IBM

Bangalore, September 14 2013: Last week  IBM announced a First-of-a-Kind engagement with IndusInd Bank. It will  provide innovative technology to enable IndusInd Bank to deepen customer relationships by delivering personalized, location-based recommendations and offers in real time. The technology flows from the India end of IBM Research to connect people with contextual information

Once a user has opted in for the service, the tool cross-references the user’s location with the user’s activity to provide useful insights. As users conduct daily transactions, such as buying airline tickets or shopping at the mall, the system sends relevant promotions by email and mobile alerts, as per the user’s preferences. 

IndusInd Bank is making a major investment to transform its entire front office – every system, process and person that touches the customer – to better anticipate, respond to and capitalize on future events quickly and ahead of its competition.

IBM’s technology is embedded within the bank’s customer channels, such as Internet Banking, ATM, SMS Alerts, Phone Banking, Branch Offices, etc.

Says  Ramesh Gopinath, Director, IBM Research - India:  “It has become imperative for banks to move towards needs-based and behavior-based segmentation to reach customers directly while improving their services. IBM helps bank adopt a client-centric approach in order to serve customers as individuals, while also boosting revenue and deepening loyalty.”

The IndusInd solution  is part of a suite of innovations  flowing from  IBM's Customer Experience Lab dedicated to helping business leaders gain deeper insights into individual customers and transform the way customers experience their products, services and brands through the use of mobile, social, cloud and advanced analytic technologies. The IBM Customer Experience Lab is headquartered at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., supported by researchers at IBM's 12 global labs including Africa, Brazil, California, China, India, Israel, Japan, Switzerland, and Texas.

Many of the solutions were showcased in Bangaloreat the IBM Technical Summit 2013. The IndusInd solution flows from IBM work on Edge Analytics.  Once a user has opted in for the service, the tool cross-references the user's location with the user's activity to provide useful insights. As users conduct daily transactions, such as buying airline tickets or shopping at the mall, the system sends relevant promotions by email and mobile alerts, per the user's preferences.

Other solutions unveiled in Bangalore:

Vibes is an enterprise software solution to help CMOs target consumers and communities that care about and participate in their industry. Individuals are identified by analyzing their interaction on social networks, and then cross-referenced with their purchase history with the company, or information about their interests based on other social networking activity. For example, a retailer can research past purchases of its Facebook fans to better determine what special offers to make to them. Several leading telecommunications providers in India are currently piloting Vibes to identify the right set of candidates for promoting specific products to increase penetration.

Social Media Event Tracker Tool (SMETT) leverages natural language processing, text mining technology and advanced analytics to comb through millions of public social network messages to derive meaningful insights. The tool was used recently by ABS CBN, a television news network in the Philippines, to analyze Twitter chatter in both English and the local language (Tagalog) about candidates in the country's recent mid-term Senatorial elections. ABS CBN used the analysis, which filtered to them in near real-time, to generate new articles for their website as part of their election coverage. Retailers are also turning to SMETT to find out what people think about their products. The tool's ability to quickly derive insight about numerous related topics in any language could help a retailer find out why a product is popular or improve its online customer service.

Ramesh Gopinath adds: "The innovations we are developing with clients in the Customer Experience Lab are enabling companies to transform their front office with speed and at scale, reshaping strategy, operations and offerings to attract, retain and exceed the expectations of an increasingly powerful customer."

For about the IBM Customer Experience Lab here

For a video on the IBM Customer Experience Lab see our home page  ( for a few days only)